If you’re using the popular blog tool WordPress, you’re probably looking for th best possible WordPress hosting provider. Choosing a host might be hard becaise the are a lot of them. I advise you to take your time and make sure you’re choosing the best option. WordPress doesn’t require a lot of “special” server features, one reason more why most hosting provider will offer to host your blog. You don’t need one at the top-of-the-line and don’t go for the cheapest plan you can find.

For the beginning blog a shared hosting plan should be enough, be sure an account upgrade is possible at any time. This is because you never know how fast your site is going to grow or how big it is going to get, and it’s always better to be well prepared. Check also the possibilities to move your account from a shared hosting plan to a VPS or dedicated server. You also want to avoid the smaller, lesser-known hosts. Go for the companies where a lot of people talk about, don’t host by some new company from a guy you met on forum for example.

Don’t forget, if you blog has frequent reader and traffic a hosting failure can ruin your blog site.

User and file permissions

WordPress has great features to maintain the core system, any plugins and your WordPress themes. While for the download and update from external files an build-in FTP function act as a kind of fall-back feature, you need the ability to edit your files right on the server. The last one requires some permissions to edit files thought the WordPress backend. A normal webserver is configured that files have a 0644 permission and directories have a 0755 permission. Most PHP/Apache powered webserver using one user ID to process the PHP files. This permission is okay for most PHP functions but not for file based functions used to edit template or plugin files. A few hosting provider offer services where PHP scripts are executed with user ID from the web hosting account. Providing hosting accounts this way is more secure than raising the values for the file/directory permissions to 666/777. If the PHP scripts are executed by the host account user WordPress doesn’t need the FTP fallback feature and all updates and downloads are served much faster. The file upload tool from WordPress back-end works without any problems if PHP scripts are executed with user permissions.

Important features you need

• Your host has to provide daily backups, ask them how long each backup is stored (several days are a must to have feature, more than a week is nice)
• Host your blog in the country where you except to have the most visitors. This way most of your visitors will see your site very fast.
• Check if the database and mail service is not hosted on the same machine as the website service. Most of the the mail server can slow down a server if mail related service have to fight back a lot of spam.

More PHP related requirements

These features are not required by the WordPress core system but many plugins: cURL, safe_mode=off, simpleXML, Socket support

WebFaction, smarter web hosting

Now that you know what to look for in a host, it shouldn’t be too hard to make a decision. If you’d like to go the fast way and skip researching, I recommend webfaction.com hosting, we use it for this blog site. WebFaction fits all of the discussed requirements, and it’s very affordable overall. It’s literally perfect for hosting WordPress sites, and if you know for a fact you are going to be a webmaster for a while, you can save a significant amount of money by pre-paying for 2-5 years. WebFaction has hosting plans ranging from 10GB to 60GB, and from $5.50 to $34.50 per month. There’s a great selection, so you can find a plan that’s perfect for your budget and your wallet.Similar Posts:

• Create custom website backups using CRON
• Website Monitoring Services: Reviews and Facts
• Sending e-mails via SMTP with PHPmailer and Gmail

Posterous is a great hosted Blog system that we talked about in this blog about social media services. The current version has already a lot of features like custom themes and functions for services like Twitter and Facebook.

The best of all their service is still free!

I noticed the last weeks that Google doesn’t index all my Posterous pages and that while I point my blog Prime Blogger to a .com domain name. My first idea was a missing Google Sitemap. I tried before to add my Posterous site to my Google Webmaster Tools account, but this requires a custom meta tag on your homepage or you need to upload a unique file to your site to proof the ownership. I suggested a function for a Google Sitemap to Brett from Posterous  and he gave me the hint that I’m able to change the HTML using a custom theme and yes this is key to get your site accepted in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Just add your site to your account and choose the meta tag to proof the sites ownership:

Next surf to your Posterous site and in the control panel choose your blog -> Settings -> Theme and customize my site -> Advanced.

Paste the meta tag code into the code box at the top. Save the settings and confirm to copy your custom theme settings.

Now it’s possible to confirm the website ownership within the Google Webmaster Tools. Next we like to add a sitemap, click Site Configuration -> Sitemaps -> Submit a sitemap

Posterous doesn’t offer a Google sitemap format but you can use the XML feed instead. This gives you not a complete sitemap but at least you can submit the latest 20 blogs to Google. I hope it helps…Similar Posts:

• A new WordPress theme for our blog
• Optimizing your WordPress Blog for Google: Part 2
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Some days ago TemplatesMonster has announced that the latest Zen-cart themes (templates) are updated for use with Zen-cart version 1.3x. These themes are fully compatible with the latest features.

According TemplateMonster:

For websites using the older versions of Zen we will still offer templates compatible with the older system, even while we offer the updated models. Templates for the old and new systems are not interchangeable so we will offer both.

That will say that users of older version of Zen-cart are able to use this new and modern templates.

Currently there are 20 unique templates with different styles for almost every kind of business.

About Zen-Cart:

Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently. (source: zen-cart.com)Similar Posts:

• Setting up an Internet shopping cart
• Build a web shop with osCommerce
• Top your sales with Google Commerce Search